Ribbons
by Re-L124C41
Summary: With her entire life twirling behind her like individual strands of one curtain fluttering in front of a window, Zhen Ji resolves to change her fate, doomed to obscurity, and weave together something marvelous.
1. Prelude

The weather was moderately warm. The weather was tolerable, not being too hot or too cold. The weather at Yecheng was nothing like the weather of her home.

Zhen Ji stopped at one end of the terrace, her arms loosely wrapped around her waist as she examined the empty courtyard of her father-in-law's palace. It was a grotesquely square shaped building, two large and empty floors comprising the entirety of the strange, dead place. The courtyard was empty, white stones dimly shimmering in the noontime sun while the palace's dark rooftops rippled with heat. In the distance, the surrounding village bustled with life. Zhen Ji stared a long time at the ant-sized homes with their miniature owners.

Yecheng was nothing like her home.

She turned her back to the village and the empty courtyard, refusing to acknowledge that she had fallen from such high heights, but the painful reminder floated through her mind with each passing day. The daughter of a small-town governor, so comfortable and safe and secure back in her small, rural home country, loved by her families' people and appreciated and wanted more than anyone she knew.

That was before the world tipped and stood on its head. Now there was an uncertain future dancing in front of every person's open and closed eyes, a filthy tyrant living lavishly in a palace and in power that did not belong to him, threatening the tradition and life style of what everyone knew so well. The disgusting ball of a man who dared raise a hand at the Imperial Family and remove them from their rightful place was causing quite the stir, threatening to move the Imperial court to a place and for reasons no one understood.

Zhen Ji felt goose bumps rise on her arms despite the bland warmth. She hugged her arms around her waist and left the terrace as a wind started up. Retreating into the castle, she listened to the soft padding of her silken slippers as she glided across the stone floors, passing empty rooms and fluttering curtains as she went. The barrenness of the palace at Yecheng seemed to match the mood of the area and the depression and void of the day and age. She remembered quite well the strange welcoming feeling of the palace when she had first arrived some odd years ago; the palace was alive, throbbing with people and voices, laughter and conversations drifting to and from on the air like a birds chirp.

Now, there was nothing. There were no joyful voices carrying on the wind, there were no interesting conversations to overhear and engage in, and there were no people to fill the large halls and rooms; there was nothing left of the former glory that was Han. Not even her new family remained. Her father-in-law, the tall and mighty Yuan Shao, had gone off to conspire with other warlords about the issue of the hideous man known as Dong Zhuo. Her husband had subsequently been sent off to govern some out of the way place to, what Zhen Ji assumed, as to keep the man out of trouble and harm's way.

Really, Zhen Ji had married quite the useless bundle of sticks. She had lamented being married to someone so plain for she had imagined herself being swept off her feet by a handsome warrior who would protect her and treasure her-such as all young girls dream-but instead was graced with quite the regular looking man with nothing more than his father's name to live off of. Easing into such a marriage was relatively simple. Yuan Xi was timid and afraid of nearly everything and was too frightened to take his wife to bed for fear of injuring her. He was nothing like his brothers. They too were also away on war-matters.

Zhen Ji slowly allowed herself in through half-way opened doors made of heavy wood. The room she had entered wasn't decorated as she thought it would be. When she had first arrived, she had expected the wife of Yuan Shao to have jade literally falling from the ceiling. She was surprised to find minimal luxuries and the most simple of furniture.

Her feet padded on the floor, careful to give the simple bed with its simple sheets a wide birth, and Zhen Ji sat herself on a little wooden stool. Yuan Shao's wife lay quiet in her bed, thin sheets tucked up to her chin and her face a deathly pale. The healthy Zhen Ji reached into a shallow basin and rung out a piece of silk, gently dabbing her mother-in-law's forehead with the soft cloth. Zhen Ji did not find it fitting to accompany her husband to his new abode when her mother-in-law lay wasting away in a prison-like palace.

A prison...

Zhen Ji placed the cloth back into the water and watched the older woman sleep. She had been having a fever for quite some time, and her health had been poor for some time-it had been teetering on the edge of oblivion a long time before Zhen Ji had even reached adulthood; it was only a matter of time before the woman finally passed on.

Staying at the home of her husbands' father, attempting to ease the pain of her mother-in-law in a palace void of life, her own life becoming more and more empty with each passing day, Zhen Ji often wondered what her father would think of her if he had been alive. She knew little about him and lived off fantasies of what he was like. To Zhen Ji, her father was a strong and proud man, filled with life and energy and passion that couldn't be matched by a man, but perhaps a deity. Perhaps her father was some sort of mythical being? No, that was silly, falling into a fantasy of her childhood husband of gallantry.

Zhen Ji reached over and dabbed at the older woman's forehead once again.

Her father would not have wanted this sort of life for his daughter. The father Zhen Ji imagined would have wanted his daughter not rotting away in a stone cage, caring for a hopeless bundle of flesh and blood, but instead wanted her fighting and striving for something more, something imarvelous/i.

He would have wanted her to create a name for herself, to step up to the frontlines in such a time and take this strange fate by the neck, twist and turn until it broke, and then to break free and create something new for herself as he might have done in his dreams.

Zhen Ji allowed herself to think thoughts as such for quite some time, allowing a fantasy to wash over her about the future. She imagined herself beautiful, more beautiful than she was already proclaimed to be, and strong with a strong man at her side instead of a weak little thing.

She looked at her fragile mother-in-law in distaste. She had never known the woman, they had never met as she was perpetually asleep; if she awoke, Zhen Ji was never there and was never summoned to the woman's bedside. Perhaps this strange bareness, courtesy of Yuan Xi, kept the woman from inquiring about her new daughter-in-law. It would be a lie to claim that it did not hurt when she was never summoned, and Zhen Ji found herself dabbing at her eyes with long sleeves of her gown when no one came just outside the bedroom and beckoned her inside, but it would not be so much a lie to say that Zhen Ji really cared whether or not she really knew the woman lying a few inches away from her.

Zhen Ji's stare narrowed and she looked down at the woman with contempt. Really, she wondered as she fingered the silk over the bowl, how could someone as fragile as Yuan Xi come from such a hateful person, and how could Yuan Shao bear staying with such a creature? Perhaps that is why the lord had left and why his son was removed from the palace. Perhaps that is why the woman is confined to the state of illness and slumber, a punishment for her awful actions and words towards others.

Zhen Ji's father would not have wanted her to live such a life, and Zhen Ji agreed. She was not destined to be married to a boneless fish for a man, nor serve under his arrogant, albeit kind and strong, father in an age where nothing was certain and power was up for grabs; power that Zhen Ji found herself thirsty for.

The servants and handmaidens were not tending to the lady this day, busy loitering around in the village getting provisions for the upcoming week. There were guards, of course, posted around the palace, but none were allowed into the lady's room.

Ever so quietly, Zhen Ji balled the silk cloth up and slowly opened her mother-in-law's mouth. She slipped the hazy blue fabric passed the woman's wilted lips and slammed her jaw upwards. The lady's body twitched and Zhen Ji leaned over and pressed her arm over the woman's nose while her hand kept her jaw shut and her mouth closed. Strangely, there was no sound, but instead Zhen Ji felt the old body twitch and jerk underneath her and it used all her weight to keep the woman from flopping off the bed and preventing Zhen Ji to begin her journey.

It was relatively quick, but then Zhen Ji did not know how long it took to kill a person by suffocation, and Zhen Ji quickly pulled the silk out of the woman's mouth and repositioned her and made the bed back to the way it had been prior to the rustle and bustle. Placing the silk into the bowl, Zhen Ji thought of her father-she thought about how he'd be proud of her and how he'd pat the top of her head fondly, praising her for beginning to break from the bonds she had been placed into-and started to cry. She rubbed at her eyes with her delicate fingers and croaked out a call for the guards, for a physician, for anyone to help.

Once the diagnosis of death had been made, the guards escorted Zhen Ji to her chambers and some of the younger maidens in service of the Yuan's stayed within Zhen Ji's rooms to mourn with the lovely woman while the news was delicately worded to be sent off to Yuan Shao and his sons.

Lying in her large bed, Zhen Ji stared at her darkened ceiling, imaging her life up until this point. She imagined it as a multitude of thread dancing around and around in the wind, united far off in the distance by her far off childhood back at her home, and dangling loosely and uselessly in front of her soft face. She envisioned herself reaching out and taking hold of all the threads with both her hands, long fingers wrapping around and keeping the soft fabric bound to her. Zhen Ji imagined herself weaving and weaving, pulling everything back together and turned to look at the threads ahead of her. They were invisible but she could feel them pulsating. They were waiting for her to step out and search for them.

She was ready to take that walk into the unknown, ready to seize the world by the collar and bend it to her will. She was ready to make a name for herself that would reverberate throughout time and would live on, somehow, when time had come to its eventual end. Yes, Zhen Ji was absolutely ready to create something absolutely marvelous.


	2. Chapter 1

"My Lady, pray remind me as to why your company is found on the battlefield?"

"If I recall correctly, this is not a battlefield. Should you look upon that which you speak, you will not find me, and realize how misunderstood you were about where I am. Of course, that would not be your first time at being mistaken, would it?"

The haughty old lieutenant puffed his cheeks outward and sucked in air through his nostrils to make himself appear larger and more powerful than he was. He stared down at Zhen Ji from atop his mighty steed. He had half a mind to berate her on her arrogance and her incorrect assumptions that he was wrong more often than he was right, but he knew that he could not. It was not within his authority to attack his lords' wife, no matter how intolerable her attitude had become. His cheeks deflated and he turned his large horse around, urging it quietly to take him away from that so-called Lady.

Zhen Ji cast her eyes downward and examined her hands folded neatly in her lap. It was unlike a woman in her position to outwardly gloat about her success, and instead of outright laugh on the lesser man's attempt at putting her off she fiddled with her fingers in what seemed like a nervous tick. She was far from nervous. She was giddy and excited. She was where she needed to be. She felt at home and complete. Dare she say it, she felt like a warrior.

Perhaps that was what she was meant to be, Zhen Ji mused from her cushioned seat near her husband's massive tent. She was meant to be a fearsome warrior that no man or woman could contend with; a force worth reckoning with. She was to be a large pillar standing in front of a might army that was under her command, mocking the enemy and then daring it to come and face her like the men they claimed to be. Zhen Ji lifted a delicate hand and pinched a portion of her bottom lip between her nails. The nails bit into the soft flesh and she recoiled in pain and released her lip. Maybe she was not meant to be a warlord after all.

Zhen Ji's face flushed in embarrassment, and although no one around, it felt as though both armies down below were staring at her. She wanted to retreat into the tent and save herself further humiliation, but at a glance at her handmaidens and how upset they seemed to be at their current place, knew that it would be unsightly and unkind to her lord to disappear. It would lower morale of the troops. It would lower the morale of her lord and husband.

_Lord and husband_.

A lord first and a husband second, Yuan Xi was. A lord that was uncomfortable with his lady tending to his wounds or the tears in his clothes and a husband that was afraid of his wife. The life of endless solitude and ignorance by her husband that had reduced Zhen Ji to a shade wallowing in the hallways of Yuan Shao's palace was over, she made sure of that.

After the death of his dear wife, Yuan Shao released Zhen Ji from her prison at Yecheng and sent her off to her lord, Yuan Xi. Yuan Shao's son was visibly shaken when his wife arrived. His face had paled somewhat and he moved to quickly finish the conversation he was having with an advisor so he could retreat before his wife could behold him. Zhen Ji saw him upon first arrival and knew he would want to run and hide in private chambers no one could enter. When he was finished with the conversation, she did not bother speaking or making a move to stop him. She allowed him to be as he wanted.

There was a piece of her that wanted so hard to dislike him, maybe even hate him, for all the wrongs he seemed to be causing her. He showed her little care, he allowed her to be lonely; he robbed her of the wonders of becoming a wife and a mother, he stole from her precious moments that most women, peasant, nobility and others, were allowed. Somewhere, not deep enough inside her to make it unknown, Zhen Ji cared somewhat for Yuan Xi. She did not have any desire, so much, to possess him and know him on an intimate level, for how could one want another when the other seems to despise that one's body and soul? Zhen Ji found it impossible to muster a flame within her body for him. Instead, she found herself caring for him as though a retired nurse would oft wonder about her long since seen baby prince that had grown into a man who needed her services no longer.

Of course, that was not to say Zhen Ji was above twisting and turning and ignoring the way her insides seemed to squirm at the mere thought of her lord and husband in a compromising position in an attempt to gain what she longed for so deeply. Yuan Xi's advisors and companions would lend her no ear and would surely scoff and dismiss her for being such a foolish woman if she opened her mouth and spoke in a voice that would make them shrink away. She found them all disinteresting and disgusting. Noble men who did nothing noble and would besmirch Zhen Ji for being a silly and idiotic woman for having wishes and wants and needs. No, she would never speak to them. She would speak with her _husband_, instead. She would sneak up upon him in the middle of the evening, pull him into a dark corner of the hallway and whisper. She would whisper sensual and sweet things; things that would make him and his male ego swell with pride and joy. Her throat would reverberate with the strings of voice, her plump lips forming around and around words as they danced from her mouth and into the cavern of her husband's ear, her hands would grasp at the back of his neck, keeping him in place for the few moments that he tried to struggle and run. He turned soft and Zhen Ji worked quickly and quietly and in the end, he yielded.

That was how Zhen Ji found herself seated in a place of observation outside Yuan Xi's tent high on a hill observing the small skirmish below.

A local band of men, determined to prove Yuan Xi an incompetent ruler had decided to rebel. Their plan was to show that Yuan Xi could do nothing to them, for he was too much of a pampered prince to think about battle or dirty his robes with the common folk. While it was true that Yuan Xi wanted nothing to do with war, his advisers did, and they persuaded him to go to battle and put the uprising down.

The bulk of Yuan Xi's army arrived the day previous and set up camp while Yuan Xi, his generals and advisers and strategists, and his wife, arrived the next day. There had been fighting early in the morning. It was nothing to marvel about, but as Zhen Ji had never once witnessed a battle but merely heard it in stories; she was amazed at the brutality of it all and the strange wonders about fighting and war. Near midday the battles were reducing to a few rag tag men who were diehard to prove their point, while their companions resigned themselves to wait until the skirmish had stopped. The leaders of the 'rebels' were quickly disheartened by the presence of their lord.

Now it was sunset and Zhen Ji and her handmaidens watched as the leaders and Yuan Xi held hands and came to an agreement. The handmaidens seemed to exhale in relief, their presence being no longer needed to observe with their mistress, and begged to be released from their position and to prepare for the night.

"Of course you may leave. Your services are no longer needed." Zhen Ji turned to face her ladies and waved them away. "I thank you all for staying with me, I sincerely do." The ladies bustled and blushed, hurrying into the tent. Zhen Ji turned back around and watched men leave the small battlefield to return home to their families while soldiers and her lord returned to their nicely made camp.

She stared down at her hands in contemplation. Battles were fought for various reasons, but the ones of late involved land and control. Battles served their purpose in reinforcing control the wealthy elite had over the peasants and the land. _Their_ land. Land was controlled by those who had the power to control, and those that had that power had vast armies and ties with the Emperor, who had a tendency to doll out land to those who had his favor.

Zhen Ji's husband had approached and his soldiers had loitered off to their tents. He barked an order to his handlers, who scurried off to do whatever it was their lord ordered them to, and Yuan Xi approached his wife stiffly.

He did not want her present at the fighting, but protocol was protocol and she attended out of duty. Her watching of the battle, however, was not something a woman should be doing. Tentatively, Yuan Xi reached out and brushed his fingers against Zhen Ji's silk-covered shoulder. Startled, she looked up with wide eyes and her mouth twitched and stretched into a small, nervous smile. At that moment, she looked almost childlike; vulnerable, even. Withdrawing his hand, Yuan Xi rested it on the hilt of his sword and then looked at his large tent.

He cleared his throat, fully aware that his wife was still giving him the startled look as if she were surprised he had actually touched her.

He, himself, was somewhat surprised, but he was slowly beginning to understand that his wife was a woman and women were not creatures that had to be feared. One should be wary of them, of course, but should never fear them. Women were harmless and beautiful, like a summer sunrise, but not dangerous like a summer squall.

"Come, beloved," Yuan Xi looked at the ground for a second and then glanced at Zhen Ji. "We will dine alone tonight, just you and me."

Inhaling sharply through her teeth, Zhen Ji looked away from her husband and felt a warm buzz in her stomach. Her lord seemed to be in an accepting mood, much more accepting than in the seemingly long time they had been husband and wife, and she was sorely tempted to laugh in pleasure. Instead, she nodded her head swiftly and followed him, eagerly, into his large tent.

She watched, almost curiously, as her husband began unlacing his armor and shrugging it off. He hung it on a crude wooden body and stared at it longer than a glance. He seemed to admire it. His eyes, often dull with disinterest, were alight and shining and he extended his hand and brushed his thumb against the overlapping plates that had once been splayed across his chest. His armor was purely ceremonial. It was dazzling and shining and expensive, one that commanded an army through sheer wealth and the power that came with it.

Yuan Xi was no warrior and he owned no real armor.

Zhen Ji took a tentative step towards her husband. "Your victory was splendid, my lord."

Stiffening, Yuan Xi pulled the rest of his armor off. "Is that what you believe, wife?" His tone was biting and cold. The moment of being a husband was over and he acted as though she was not fit to be his wife once more. He was afraid of her no more than he was of the sun or the moon, but he held some contempt for the woman his father bartered and dumped on him. "You believe me to be a good warrior? A good lord?"

Zhen Ji stared at him firmly. "You are a decent lord to your people. You treat them more fairly than other lords do; you do not ask much of them; you do not abuse them too harshly; and you are kind."

"Bah," he waved her words off.

"There are many men who _claim_ to be good to their people, but how many can rightly and truthfully say that they are?"

Yuan Xi squared his shoulders. "I do not want to be a good lord. I want to be a warlord. I would have that beast, Dong Zhuo, at my feet, begging for mercy. I would have my brother's look to me for aid in battles. I would have my father think more highly of me."

Sighing quietly, Zhen Ji slumped her shoulders and felt tired. Her husband, as gracious as he was, was no man. He was a timid puppet, pulled around by his father's wishes and desires. Yuan Xi had no real ambitions. Instead, he wanted to be thought of as competent, and having his wife believe him so was no concern of his; he wanted his _family_ to believe it. Zhen Ji considered herself as much as a family member as her dead mother-in-law and her lord's brother's sisters, but her husband did not. She despised him for a brief moment and then dismissed it. She had no right, because although she wished that her husband would acknowledge her, just as he wished his family noticed him, she was but the trophy wife to the son of an important man.

"I will be taking my supper alone, Zhen Ji. Return to your tent."

Bowing her head and bending her knees in a curtsy, Zhen Ji quietly left her husband's tent and slowly ambled towards her own. She ate her meal with her handmaidens, but Zhen Ji's food was as tasteless as ash and did not cure her sudden bought of silent sadness.


End file.
